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Book Of The Year Award > 2011 > Peter Pan's First XI
Kevin Telfer, Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
Purchase on Amazon
 Approaching this book with caution may well be how many people feel, with the 1988 book by the always excellent David Rayvern Allen, Peter Pan and Cricket, reposing on most cricket reader's bookshelf. It is also quite often a question not of the quality of the biographer but how the reader feels about the subject of the biography. As one who never warmed to Peter Pan in any shape or form and finds a lot of the 'literary' affectations of that era, somewhat tedious, I began to wonder if I was perhaps, the right man for the job, so to speak.
However, on the first point, where the Rayvern Allen book was concerned equally with Barrie's literary output and correspondence, the Telfer book is more of a straight biography with a heavy emphasis on both the games and players for Barrie's cricketing conceit, The Allahakbarries as well as The Punch XI. There is enough clear blue water for this year's book to be treated on its own merits without great reference to its predecessor, other than to note that David Rayvern Allen's book is still well worth seeking out.
The main body of the book deals with the games of cricket that Barrie played; he certainly was available for just about any side that wanted him but his true love was for The Allahakbarries, mainly because he could select the team, choose the opponents and most importantly, write an account of the match which he could refine and adapt in order to provide him with scope for more literary work. As a consequence, there is very little point comparing any surviving scorebook with the written account; non-fiction and fiction rarely have much to say to one another.
As a side issue, there is one interesting connection with The Cricket Society. A deal of Barrie's social life and much of his recorded cricket was played at Broadway, where his great friends Antonio and Mary de Navarro lived. A cache of letters between Barrie and Mary de Navarro, many of them unpublished, were to prove the basis of a large part of the book and were made available to the author by Michael, de Navarro, a long-time distinguished stalwart of The Cricket Society XI.
The reader's reaction to the book will, as previously stated, depend much on the view that one takes to Barrie. The book is undoubtedly well-written and researched to a high degree but inevitably, the question will be – was it worth it? Well, each to its own but candidly, the more one read, the less one became interested in the life and cricket of J.M. Barrie. It's not the author's fault; rather the fact that humour dates and times change and there is just that element of whimsy and coyness that characterises Peter Pan in the doings of a minor literary cricket club. Sorry but there it is.
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